Thread regarding Shell Oil layoffs

Shell is in limbo land, it is obsessed with cutting cost and will do it come he-l or high water. Meanwhile the experienced technical staff who show gold mine after gold mine of profitable new plays and back fills as well as beautiful field rejuvenation opportunities are effectively paid lip service....great work but it is just too risky and costs too much. Nett result we do so little that optimises and secures the production we need to earn cash that would feed the funnel of renewable. Renewables that we continually turn down sometimes at the last minute after wasting millions or billions. It's all a cheap, ill thought out, ploy to try and convince the markets Shell is a great long term bet....far from it. Shell will likely be simply a trading company in 10 to 12 years after they sack all their best upstream people who know how to do anything and realize they made a huge mistake. A mistake which convinced so many that Shell needs to learn the hard way because they won't listen to their staff. A real shame. They used to be a truly awesome technical company. Now there are next to no strong technical subsurface staff on the EC LT and zero prospect of that ever being a reality. If you have a commercial background and zero technical ability and you are excellent in power point slide presentation and use all the LT buzz words you're destined for the top of a company that will be an empty shell within 10 years.
Good news is that oil and gas will be around for many decades to come so all of you good development and subsurface folk....there is life after Shell and there are many companies who will value your expertise.

After EOR they pioneered the impressive POS Prelude. Shell lacks the humility to listen and learn. Shell lacks the wisdom to know who to trust. Shell knows best.

In many cases, it’s all about who you know than what you know. Some managers will layoff good employees just to save their puppets. Nepotism pay a big role at Shell US offices. Can’t wait to take my package and get the he-l out this toxic environment!

If one is technically competent, hard working, can recognise and identify competence then one can get competence from Bangalore. Otherwise one gets from Bangalore what they are. Encouraging sycophancy of Bangalore on one side but complaining about Bangalore on the other side does not help.

In Bangalore too there are these "future leaders" and "managers". The rest once inside Shell Bangalore figure out that real technical delivery does not matter in Shell. They learn playing the game to further themselves. Lots of talking, no substance, power point presentations, l...ing western bosses for job upgrade or for overseas postings. Technical delivery has been suffering in Bangalore too defeating the purpose of outsourcing.

I disagree. The issue is that the vast majority of leaders in Shell have never actually worked the business. They have carried bags, made power point slides (excel if they are exceptional) and ran workshops.

It’s easy to look at any job and think … that’s not that hard, that is until you actually try and do it. As a result of this they feel they can outsource work to cheaper overseas hubs / less experienced staff, because it’s not that ‘hard’ …

The reason subsurface staff are paid so highly is because it justifies investments in the 100-1000’s of millions of dollars, all while doing it with limited data and significant risks. Compare that to a plant manger that has 20-30 reports, they are a ‘manager’. But the process and problems are really quite well defined and the investments are in the 10’s of millions (or less).

Good luck to Shell, outsource this stuff to someone with 5 years experience in Bangalore that has never been offshore or actually gotten their hands dirty …

Pretty intesting read. Here is something thats not going to be fun to hear but is facts. Of course shell still values high end suburface staff. But they might not value them as much as they cost. In any company any industry anywhere you are not going to find a more expensive and harder to demonstrate what they actually do on the day to day basis than high end subsurface teams.

The ship is sinking and on fire and if you can’t see it you’re not looking

Shell bought bg to grow a bit. But its own technical work and exploration has been poor for a long time due to very bad management and no continuity. Plus valuing management bull sh** over real technical work.

Amongst upstream professionals outside the organization, Shell is mostly known for exiting the Stabroek Block in Guyana prior to the huge discovery made in 2015 by its then-partner, ExxonMobil....walking away from (literally) billions and billions of profitable, low-cost barrels and a secure future of production. Shell had, at one point, 50% working interest and Exxon the remaining 50%. Even though the technical teams inside Shell recommended Shell stay in the block and drill, a senior Exploration executive went against the teams advice and exited the block. Ego trumped expertise. Exxon went on to discover 11 Billion barrels for the consortia that includes CNOOC and Hess (now Chevron)...but NOT Shell. SO, by NOT taking the advice of their smart, well-intention exploration professionals a decade ago, they blew away the biggest discovery trend in the hemisphere in many many decades.

No they don’t. All weal cares about is short term share price for his share option. The end.
If you look a bit deeper the people that are connected and network survive, not the workers. It’s why shell will become an investment house in the end

To get far in shell you need to organise a workshop to talk about what you might do. Everyone will say how good the session was and how much value you’ve added. In reality of course nothing has changed.
In the meantime the engineers actually optimising production and delivering the oil are getting on with their work and are ignored.

how do you learn "Shells" leadership

Shell’s view is that they can always train someone to do the technical work, but not leadership. I learned this quite late into my career.

Amen.

Same thing for downstream.

It’s not only for Shell, American culture thinks leadership is more important than quality work and delivery, sigh. Is it the same for all business?

Answer-NO

Tech publications dried up when team leads decided it looked bad for them and good for staff. After reshape no one could be bothered to write anything, too much effort for nothing.

The simple answer is - NO !